Why, Sonny, in my day we didn’t have no fancy Wikipedia, we had to look everything up in a book! And we were durned glad to have them…

The same kind of people who pounce on spelling mistakes in a forum will be quick to trip you if you confuse the Internet with the World Wide Web. The Internet is actually just the connected computers and servers. The World Wide Web is the documents stored on those computers, all linking to each other and able to be traversed and retrieved across various computers by a system of protocols.

The Internet is quite usable without the World Wide Web system. In fact, every time you download a file through FTP, log into an IRC chat room, remote access another computer using VPN, or send email directly from computer to computer, you are doing just that. Likewise when you have an entity such as a college or corporation which has an ‘intranet’ or internal network to allow computers within this network to communicate. Once you and your associate connect computers, there’s nothing to stop you from inventing your own communications protocol and ignoring the standard methods – though most find it more convenient to use the same systems anyway.

An examination of the many special programs and protocols we used for the Internet gives you a good idea of why creating a World Wide Web was necessary. In the first place, you didn’t have Google, or any other search engine as we know it. You had gopher. Gopher would index the available text files and binaries on a local directory and give you a menu. The local directory might also have addresses of other servers with more files, and you could tell it to go there and present you with a new menu on that server. Whatever you eventually told it to fetch for you, it would download it through FTP. Picture all this happening from a text terminal with nothing but letters on a black screen. A few gopher servers still survive today.

You didn’t have RSS feeds or Yahoo groups; instead you had Usenet. Usenet simply rode on top of the email protocol, so you subscribed to groups and you’d all get the news emailed to you and you could reply to news items, starting discussions. Similar to IRC chat, the Usenet system used servers, so that everything was slightly different depending on where you went. Usenet today still exists in very much the same form, and most people know it today as Google groups, which manages it now.

Instead of what we know as websites today, the closest we had was either servers or BBS (bulletin board systems). There are still a few BBSs out there run by hobbyists. BBS were the most primitive form of peer-to-peer communication. You had to dial into them using a telephone line. Once there you could upload and download files, and interact with the system operator and other visitors. In a way, you had a one-stop system that could host text documents, graphics files, MIDI music files, and even games, plus posting to the board to talk to the host and other visitors – why, our concept of “Web 2.0″ doesn’t sound all that modern now, does it?

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